We moved to Daylight saving
time this morning, which still involves setting multiple clocks. More and more are
setting themselves automatically, though, including now two of my cameras, the Olympus OM-D E-M1 Mark I and
II. They set the time from a mobile telephone if you can manage to connect to them with
this horrible OI.Share application.

Or do they? After fighting my way through the inevitable manual configuration (remove all
other networks, connect to camera) and returning to “Remote Control”, nothing happened. It
seems that you have to at least wait another 10 seconds until the phone takes over complete
control of the camera.

And then the time was out by 30 seconds! Not surprisingly, the phone was too. A bit of
searching revealed that there's yet another
setting, Date and time/Automatic date and time. So I
set that, but nothing changed. A clock display app showed that the phone remained out by 30
seconds.

GPS time? Out of the house to let the phone sync with the world, but it didn't, even after
10 minutes. Reboot. Hang. I think this one is “normal”, so I powered down and up again
and tried to sync. It still took in the order of 10 minutes. Can this have something to do
with the change to daylight saving time? It doesn't do that normally, and it didn't repeat
it later.

I'm still trying to find out how to download videos from SRF. MediathekView can download some of them, but only some of them. Yesterday I had
tried to view one that doesn't show up in the MediathekView list, but had been told that,
due to content restrictions, it was only accessible between 22:00 and 6:00,
implicitly CET. That's OK
here, especially since we moved to DST: it
corresponds to 7:00 to 15:00 here. And then I was told it was only accessible
in Switzerland.

It did that with some other programmes too, including stuff that was included as “free” in
MediathekView. OK, can MediathekView
download it? Yes, no trouble. So what's the issue?

Searching the web came up with this script, which claims
to be able to download videos from SRF. It's not complicated, and it refers to a
program rtmpdump. What's that? How about that, it's a port, and it's installed:

Yes, we've come to realize that Donald Trump is a disaster for his country and, to a lesser extent, for the rest of
the world. But he continues to astound. You'd think he had a motto “When in a hole, keep
digging. Make it the biggest hole ever. Really!”.

...want everything to be done for them when it should be a community effort. 10,000
Federal workers now on Island doing a fantastic job. ...Such poor leadership ability by
the Mayor of San Juan, and others in Puerto Rico, who are not able to get their workers to
help. They.... The Mayor of San Juan, who was very complimentary only a few days ago, has
now been told by the Democrats that you must be nasty to Trump.

Even by his standards, that's disgusting. When are they going to rid their country of him?

What is it? On the face of it, it looks exotic. Spent some time looking through the list
of local wildflowers, but didn't find anything. But then Margaret Swan contacted me: it's
a Freesia refracta, and
apparently the “alba” variant, to judge by the offerings from Diggers Club. The
normal ones are yellow:

Notification slip in the letter box today: two parcel for me
in Napoleons. One was the
disks that I had ordered last week, so off to pick them up. And the other parcel—a mixer
tap for the kitchen—wasn't there! It seems that the slips are printed in the sorting office
in Wendouree, so it's possible that the
thing might not have made it to delivery. I would have been particularly unhappy if I had
made a 40 km journey just for that.

Continued investigating how to get programmes from SRF today. There's this script, which
complained about non-implemented functionality. It starts:

#!/bin/sh

Who uses /bin/sh any more? Linux people just link it to /bin/bash, so I
guessed that it required bash functionality. Changing the first line to point
to bash fixed it. Then I ran it, and got no output, neither on the screen nor on the
disk. Time for some script reading. It seems that it's really just a wrapper for
rtmpdump, which proves to be
related to mplayer. The business end
is:

It seems that the URL http://www.srf.ch/webservice/cvis/segment/$i/.json is an old,
worn-out magic word. I haven't seen any response for any file. Do I care? Yes, I think
so, but do I care enough?

The other discovery is that youtube-dl can
also download a number of other sites. But it also had difficulty with SRF:

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14)/src/Series55 -> youtube-dl 'http://www.srf.ch/play/tv/schweizer-film/video/der-koch?id=68e5b4b2-cee6-48e6-824e-b54b29feb545'[SRGSSR] 68e5b4b2-cee6-48e6-824e-b54b29feb545: Downloading JSON metadata
ERROR: For legal reasons, this video is only available in Switzerland.
You might want to use a VPN or a proxy server (with --proxy) to workaround.

OK, free proxies are available. But they don't all do quite what I'm looking for:

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/14)/src/Series59 -> youtube-dl --proxy https://gateway.j-host.ch/ 'http://www.srf.ch/play/tv/tatort/video/goldbach?id=3d1ed3ae-3d41-40ce-be6f-f87d11bbde60'[SRGSSR] 3d1ed3ae-3d41-40ce-be6f-f87d11bbde60: Downloading JSON metadata
ERROR: Unable to download JSON metadata: '' (caused by BadStatusLine("''",)); please report this issue on https://yt-dl.org/bug . Make sure you are using the latest version; type youtube-dl -U to update. Be sure to call youtube-dl with the --verbose flag and include its complete output.

I now have a new system disk for lagoon, Yvonne's computer. Time to upgrade the system, which also involves moving it to a smaller, quieter
box, my old ThinkCentre that was
once called despair.

First problem: despair does not have
a DVI output. Will I even be able to start
X on it in native resolution? But that's in the
future. For the time being, how do I migrate? Downloaded the latestFreeBSD installation disk and
started it. Things have changed at some point, and I was rather surprised to see the
install DVD want to fsck itself. Chose my standard disk layout: two alternative root
file systems, 40 GB each, 20 GB of swap, and the rest of the 2 TB 1.8 TB
as /home.

How do you boot from the second root partition? I made the choice easy by not using the
first one at all; the prepared copy of eureso, my up-to-date virtual machine, will go
there. So I installed and rebooted:

Not completely unexpected, though not very clever: although it installed the root file
system on /dev/ad0p4, it's looking for it on on /dev/ad0p1 (or, to use its
inimitable terminology, 0:ad(0p1); when will people harmonize these names?). OK,
that's simple: tell it to boot from 0:ad(0p4):

No simple error message for us! Just a crash. But at least I have a name
now: gptboot. Reading the man page was sobering: it seems that there's no way to
tell it how to boot if you have a problem like mine. It goes through attributes in
the GPT partitions: bootme
and bootonce, and also sets bootfailed when appropriate, and to set the first
two you need a running system. Somehow that seems wrong, and I'm still wondering whether I
can be bothered to fix it.

Also discovered that I had chosen the wrong system. I have two boxes that look almost
identical. In December
2015 it was a Core 2 Q9550, with a CPUMark of 3641 at the time (now 3997). But now I discover that
it's a Core
2 Duo E6550 with a CPUMark of only 1499, much less than half the speed. I must have
swapped it with stable. That'll need changing. Unfortunately, it doesn't make any
difference to the lack of a DVI connector.

The weather is gradually becoming more friendly, and perhaps not coincidentally the
Marriotts from next door are back from their tours round Australia. Because of the weather
we took the dogs for a slightly longer walk, up the top of Stones Road to Westons Road,
noting in the process various flowers:

We've made tagines relatively frequently
lately, not only because we have the hardware. One result is that we have a whole lot
of cous-cous
(semolina) which needs to be eaten. So:
cook cous-cous (dish) for a change.

What's the difference between a tagine and cous-cous anyway? They're both slow-cooked
dishes of meat and vegetables. I had asked Mohammed Ifadir
in Marrakesh, and he told me the
obvious: tagine is cooked in a sealed pot, and cous-cous is steamed. In addition, there are
things that you put in cous-cous that you don't put in tagine, like pumpkin and cabbage.

Somehow the difference doesn't seem that important. Another one, clear to both of us, is
that cous-cous (dish) is served with cous-cous (semolina). Since we don't have the steamer
(or maybe we do, but not the experience to use it), I decided to make a tagine and serve
with cous-cous (semolina).

The big difference here is the quantity of vegetables: nearly 2 kg, compared to 1 kg in my
recipe. Because of that (and the cous-cous) I left out the chick peas. I also left out the
parsley, because we didn't have any, and I doubled the quantities of spices and put in 30 g
of salt instead of 20. I also omitted the saffron: I haven't been able to taste it on
previous occasions. The dish is enough for several days, so I only made a few almonds; I'll
do more before further servings.

The result? Not bad, and the cous-cous suited the dish. But for my liking, there were too
many vegetables. On the other hand, the double quantity of spices is good, and despite the
increase in salt, it wasn't enough. That's partially due to the additional vegetables, of
course, but I'll cautiously increase it in the base recipe, this time from 20 g to 25 g, and
spread it over the top layer and let the condensation work it into the juice.

/etc/ttys, /etc/gettytab have specific additions that need to be merged.

/boot/loader.conf needed to be copied (by default it's empty), and the disk
specification needed to be adjusted.

The big question: does X work? No. It came up in
1024×768 mode. I've seen this so many times before that I can't be bothered to try. What I
need is a sensible graphics card. In the meantime I put the disk in the old machine, which
meant that I had to copy the /etc/X11/xorg.conf as well. But then it Just Worked.

Left it there for Yvonne to discover, and sure enough, she
(almost) didn't notice any difference. For some reason the firefox fonts are different, and her
mutt mailbox was open read-only. The
latter proved (bizarrely) to be related to the lack of the
file /usr/local/lib/.muttrc, why, I don't know.

But on the whole a relatively straightforward update. Gradually I can address the more
complicated issue of upgrading eureka. In the meantime, time to start a HOWTO page on what to look at for lagoon.

In passing, it's interesting to note that you can copy a root file system with tar,
as above, but you can't then just remove it with rm -rf: a number of the files have
the schg flag set, and a couple have other flags set too. So it's good to know
that you can reset all of them with:

They're from my web server showing failed web lookups (/dump.tgz <- http://lemis.com says
that there was a link to /dump.tgz from http://lemis.com), and I send them to
help maintain document integrity. But all of these are fake links to presumed database
backups. Do people really keep their database backups where they can be accessed
remotely? In any case, I was going to block the sites until I discovered that there were a
whole lot of them. I wonder how many people will get bitten.

Yvonne stopped in at the post office to pick up the tap that
should have been there on
Monday. It still hadn't made it. Damn—not because it's late, but because making a
complaint to Australia Post is such a pain.
Went through the motions of entering a complaint. Tracking number, please. OK, can do
that. Name of sender? Post code of sender? My name? My post code? When was the item
sent?

Idiots! That's all in the tracking information, along with the fact that it was in
Wendouree over 2 days ago. Spent another 5 minutes looking for a phone number and asking
their stupid search functions. Finally found one (13 7678, which they obfuscate as 13
POST), along with one “From overseas”, hidden behind dots: +61-3-8847-9045. That's the one
I want, since it's free. Called up, spoke to Josh, to whom I had to explain the situation
twice. He put me on hold (“Sorry, I need to write an email”) and came back about 10 minutes
later with the information that he had started a process and that I would receive an email.
I didn't:

Down to the house forest today with the dogs, armed with a macro lens to take photos of what
wildflowers I might find. As usual, Yvonne went first to be
sure that there were no kangaroos, but one remained anyway. It appeared to have been
injured and unable to jump the fence. It tried to jump, but fell over sideways.

What to do? If we left him there, he would die. Time for wildlife rescue.

This wasn't the first such occurrence—in fact, it was the fourth. I thought I had kept the
number when Vince came around to save another kangaroo three years ago, but I couldn't find
it. Found one on the web, and they took forever to attend to my call. Finally I was able
to give the details, and an hour later I got a call back—from Vince. He was out in another
45 minutes, and we went down the back. This time he was alone, and the light was better.
As expected, the kangaroo had not moved far, and he was able to approach it relatively
easily:

Vince couldn't detect any external injury, but he thinks that it might have some internal problems. It's
an Eastern Grey, male,
about 2 years old, and underweight, which might be related to his other problems. He thinks
it might have some chances of survival, though typically only about 25% make it. The rest
at least have a more humane death.

One thing to remember: Vince's phone number, 0418 501 508. He's from the Wala animal
sanctuary, where Karen is also available under 0409 137 323. They no longer have a web
site, though the cards still mention http://www.wala-animal-sanctuary.com.au/.

It turned out that yesterday's “fix” to Yvonne's read-only
mailbox issue didn't work. Her index page looks different, and the % sign indicating
read-only status was in a different position. Back to my diary to find out what I did last
time. On 13 June 2010 the issue was a missing rpc.lockd process. But that wasn't the case today. On
another occasion I rebooted, and that worked round the problem. That sounds so Microsoft.
So I went looking.

Permissions? Yes, that seems reasonable, but they were all correct. Make a local copy?
Worked. So an NFS problem. ktrace showed the mailbox being opened twice, each time O_RDONLY.
Why twice? And there was no obvious reason why O_RDONLY. The second time round it
was after a program start of mutt_dotlock. Did that fail? I had
started ktrace with the -i flag, but I didn't get a trace:
it's setgid. And when I try
as root, the operation succeeds.

OK, while I hunt down the problem, let Yvonne access the mailbox directly on eureka.
Surprise, surprise! That also fails. That appears to exclude a number of potential
culprits, including (obviously) NFS, but also apparently the new installation
of lagoon. But it happened exactly then. I'm baffled.

Automatic phone call from Australia Post today to ask me how I liked yesterday's interaction with their customer service team. Answered appropriately,
and was offered the option to be connected with customer service for a follow-up. OK, since
they asked, selected the option and was connected to Orrin.

Asked him to forward a problem report to the IT people that their server 116.240.201.166
didn't have reverse lookup. OK, noted, will inform people. A little too fast (“let's get
rid of this crank”). Asked him to repeat the number, and of course he couldn't. Asked to
be connected to a supervisor, and he went through the motions, came back and started asking
questions about my item. Sorry, this is a DNS issue. More questions. Sorry, this is a DNS
issue. Sorry, I'm just responsible for parcel tracking. Understood, please connect me to
somebody who can handle the problem.

Finally he connected me to his supervisor (Emily, I think), who sounded more interested.
Orrin had told her that I was complaining about spam. Set her right, and after some
investigation discovered that this was the second problem. The first was that Josh hadn't
sent me an email at all yesterday: he didn't have an email address, but “hadn't noticed”
when he sent the email. So the message really is spam.

Low marks to the front line “consultants” at AusPost. At least I was able to establish that
the delivery driver had found the item in his car, and that it should have been in Napoleon
(yes, Emily wasn't prepared to get that misspelling fixed) today.

ZDF seems to have a different
algorithm from other German broadcasters for determining whether I'm in Germany or not, and
for some reason they have decided that I am not. Presumably this is based on analysing
different IP addresses.

OK, my Class C is routed
internationally, though it stops somewhere
in North Carolina. I can easily
route it on to here, but various considerations make it a bad idea in general. What I
really need is the way to tunnel a specific IP address from there to here.

OK, that's what an IP-IP tunnel is,
right? I've used one of them before, and have exact
instructions.

Problem: I need IP addresses at each end. I can't use existing ones without disrupting
normal connectivity. In particular, my National
Broadband Network connection only has one address, and my connection on the external
server has a /30 netmask (4 addresses). One is the base address, one is the router, one is
broadcast, and one is
the SunOS memorial broadcast address.
Nothing I could really use.

What are the alternatives? SSH
tunnels are one, but they only handle a single port at each end. Is that enough?
Probably not.

While I was there, I looked for a few other locations of interest in another link that I found, with nice pictures but again hazy on location. Boroka Lookout looks stunning, but a 90m walk each way? That's too long for us, and
it wouldn't fit in the time plan. It wasn't until I looked at it again that I discovered
that it was 5 minutes and 90 metres. That's a surprisingly long time for the distance (5
metre elevation change), but certainly within our time constraints.

And then a nice gesture: Google Maps asked me if it should send the route to my phone. Yes,
for once that makes sense. Clicked yes, it asked which device, so I selected Samsung Phone
(talipon.lemis.com, as if it knew that). Shortly later the phone whistled at me.
For once, things Just Worked.

Fire up the phone, which was sleeping. Where's the route? In maps, obviously. Nope, just
a restaurant recipe somewhere that it didn't want to divulge. Messages? Nope, nothing
there. GMail? Unlikely, and nope.

By this time I was out of options. The last one: ask on IRC. Not much idea there either.
Finally Peter Jeremy came up with a helpful suggestion:

<grO0gle> All gmaps says is "try "Work"".
<grO0gle> So maybe the issue is that I'm retired.
<peter> grO0gle: I think you should unretire and get a job at Google so you can whinge at them directly.

Finally he came up with the suggestion that I look at “Notifications”. Where's that?
Checked all the funny icons, but couldn't find it. Ah, no, Notifications are a different,
more complicated interface. Following Peter's instructions, start at the root window (or
whatever it's called in Android):

Where does all this crap come from? I didn't ask for it, and there's lots of it. It
completely obfuscated the map notification, which was there, but disappeared as soon as I
selected it.

OK, this works. I wonder how many Android users learn to use their device just based on the
documentation (of which I have received none). And now I need to work out how to get rid of
these gratuitous news feeds.

A final decision! With the option to appeal. That sounds right for eBay. But what
nonsense! How can they refuse to admit a refund? And why don't they attempt to justify
their decision? Of course I appealed. But why this nonsense in the first place?

Off to Halls Gap today for the annual
Grampians Wildflower Show, as
mentioned yesterday. I had
spent some time planning the route: unlike in other countries, small back roads are usually
faster than the main highways. They're more direct, usually in acceptable condition, and
the main Western
Highway is usually congested. In the days before GPS I worked out a number of ways
from Skipton
to Ararat, and the navigator
took me somewhere round there.

So yesterday I stored the route in my GPS navigator—not an easy business, since navigators
go by addresses, not generally landmarks. So I had had to manually type in the coordinates,
which it didn't like much either: not reachable by road. So in the end I was left with
likely-sounding destinations like Mount Zero and Mount Difficult.

As described, I also stored the route from Google Maps in my telephone, and to be really
sure I also charged up my old ALDI tablet as a
backup.

Things didn't quite work out. When I came into the office this morning, both phone and
tablet were dead, though both had been connected to the charger: the tablet has a bad
charger connection, and I hadn't managed to keep it connected. The phone, it seems, had
discharged because the GPS receiver was on; sometimes, but not always, it uses more power
than the charger can provide.

Off on the route that the (dedicated) GPS navigator had chosen for us. All went well until
past Skipton, but then it took
us down an unmade road. Not what I had asked for. Checked my settings, and sure enough,
unmade roads were not allowed. Where were we, anyway? The overview is terrible—after all,
this is only a 7" display, and even the map view is impossibly vague. Worse, the
bloody thing won't even show a compass direction! Still, the road didn't look too bad, so
we took it anyway—only about 2 km.

But then we hit another stretch, much worse—there was a big pit in the middle of the road,
which I managed to avoid, not without some cursing from Yvonne. What to do? I didn't have the foggiest idea where I was, nor even the direction I was
travelling in. I really should have taken a real map with me, though that has the
disadvantage that I can't easily transform the geographical coordinates to places on the
map. So we continued—until we hit an impassable object:

That's too deep for our car, especially since if we got stuck, it could be hours before we
somebody could get us out again. So off back again, this time asking the navigator for
“fast” rather than “short”. It took us over more unpaved roads, a bridge over the river,
and then back almost exactly to the other side of the ford.

Back at the exhibition, for $2 a head we got entry to a display of some interesting plants,
including food eaten by the
local Aboriginals (and, to
be politically correct,
non-existent Torres Strait
Islanders). There were also suggested guided walks through the Botanic Gardens (who
apparently don't have a web site) and some walks further afield.

Bought a couple of books on local plants—they're not that different
from Enfield State Park at
home—and off on our predetermined path. But we didn't find anything. The first stop was
supposed to
be Boroka
Lookout, but it took us just
past Silverband Falls car park
and told us to drive into a gully. Time to look at the documentation I had printed out.
Damn! I had left them at home!

OK, I still had the route that I had
sent to my phone yesterday. Turn on the phone. Route gone! The phone had powered down, so
clearly the route was no longer needed. Maybe there's a way to conjure it back, but I don't
know the incantation. It was still on my computer at home, but that doesn't help much.
Still, we didn't want Silverband Falls, so on—and back to Halls Gap.

Somewhat frustrated, looked at the route in the navigator. All waypoints still present.
Dammit, let's go home! Cleared my painstakingly entered route before it occurred to me that
I could at least have saved it for later analysis. Yvonne had shown interest in Lake Fyans, of which there had been a description in the exhibition:

Not easy to read on a tiny display, but what I did read was that there had been a bushfire
in 2014, and it hadn't completely recovered. In addition, since September had been so cool,
things weren't really ready yet. So we went on. It wasn't until I could read the
description properly that I discovered that it might well have been worthwhile.

On the way to Lake Fyans, found a large number of flowers on the wayside:

and a plant without a label that they tell me is
a Pultenaea nivea. I thought I had
misheard the name, but there really is a species of that name. But it doesn't look
anything like what I would expect of a Pultenaea.

How were we to get back home? Presumably the navigator would choose the same way back. But
no, it didn't. It took us
to Ararat. From there I pretty
well know the back roads, but it didn't go that way: it took me down the Western Highway
(grr) for a couple of kilometres, and then down a road I don't know. At least no unmade
roads? No such luck:

This time it was much longer, but fortunately not as bad as Anderson's Lane, the road with
the ford. But this is really useless. I bought a GPS navigator to have more control over
where I go. Instead I end up with inaccurate map data causing not only discomfort, but real
problems, and the lack of overview means that I can't even recover from them. I wonder if
the Big Brands do any better. I certainly wouldn't rely on it.

What do we do next time? Plan routes with fallback to maps. Take the guided tours of the
area. And what else? To be determined. Why is this all so difficult?

Clearly it was a mistake on eBay's part to
close my case yesterday without a refund. Maybe the first one was done by computer, but
clearly an appeal should get the attention of a human. Maybe it did, but I was still
astounded by their final (final) decision:

Again no reason. How can they get away with this? Time to make some noise.

Every time (far too many of them) that I have trouble with eBay, I try to find some valid,
honest reason. And in this case, it's quite possible that the reason is that they have a
moron handling these cases. But it's time that the authorities took note and did something
about it. I can see a long fight ahead. And maybe it's the thought of that fight that lets
them get away with it. I wonder how many other people have this problem and just give up.

Yesterday's journey left me
with no fewer than 8 GPS logs, none of them covering the entire journey. I left the phone
(talipon) charging until we got
to Halls Gap, and the car navigator
(the other seven) stopped logging every time I stopped the car, so I had some gaps.

In any case, I didn't know how to process the logs. There must be a converter...

After a bit of searching, found GPSBabel (“convert, upload, download data from GPS and Map programs”). Just what I need, and there's
a FreeBSD port for it, so I installed it.

And it doesn't create any output. What caused that? The -i igo8 looks like
the only choice for input file format. Is it wrong anyway? Or is this because the log
wasn't closed properly? Is there a way to identify what kind of file it is? If so, I
didn't find it.

Looking further, I found this page, which describes my navigator, which can apparently write GPX logs to an
external micro SD card. Where did I put
that card? They're far too small, and I'm sure I've lost numerous cards. The only one I
have now is in talipon, and who knows what havoc I would wreak if I took it out.
Called Chris Bahlo, got her voice mail, and asked for the loan of a micro SD card.

By the time Yvonne returned with
an SD card from Chris, I no longer needed
it: GPSVisualizer, a site I have used
before, allows you to upload
(m)any formats and convert them to GPX, with no more pain than the usual problem of
specifying file names to firefox. And it also displays them on a map, and allows you to download the resultant image.
Much slower than doing it locally—if it works—but not that big a deal.

In the process, firefox asked me
what do to with the file. Open with marble? Or save it? Save it, of course. “Do
this without asking” box? Greyed out. I'll never understand firefox. But what's marble?

=== grog@eureka (/dev/pts/12)~/Documentation/GPS57 -> cat /usr/ports/astro/marble/pkg-descrMarble is a Virtual Globe and World Atlas that you can use to learn
more about Earth: You can pan and zoom around and you can look up
places and roads.

Certainly worth looking at—some other time. At the moment I only have part of a map. How
do I merge the things? It seems that GPS Track Editor can do that. But
that, too, can wait. The files from the car GPS are
in XML, and they don't overlap in time, so I
should just be able to cat them together and remove header and trailer information. And
yes, that worked fine. I was then able to upload the map to Wikiloc, another site I have used before. Here, too, I
need to learn a number of details.

On the face of it, the route is probably about as direct as you can get. The real problem
is that the maps appear to be incorrect, and to claim that they are surfaced when they are
not. This is particularly obvious on the way back: the unpaved stretch was rather more than
20 km, fortunately not too bad.

Firstly, the route is nothing like I put into the navigator. From Halls Gap we were
supposed to go to Heatherlie Quarry, way up to the north. Here's the Google Map which I copied into the phone:

The map above only shows the bottom section of that map, down to Silverband Falls.

Secondly, the return from Silverband Falls to Halls Gap is shown as a straight line. That's
presumably because the navigator wasn't logging at the time. When I find a way to merge two
different logs, I should be able to fix that.

There are so many other things I want to do. Wouldn't it be nice to run the cursor over a
route and have images and times pop up? Or just to add images at various points. I'm
pretty sure that Wikiloc doesn't do that. I can add images, but they don't get incorporated
into the map, and it doesn't display the location information associated with them.

OK, it's been nearly a month since I ordered a disk on eBay, and I still have neither item nor refund. And
eBay, in its infinite wisdom, has decided that “A refund won't be issued for this case”.
I've already complained vociferously about this decision.

But that's just eBay. I still have a case against Craig Weber (eBay
seller klearview_au). Call up Consumer Affairs Victoria, and while waiting in the inevitable hold pattern, was
referred to the web site. For once, that might make sense, and so I took a look.
“Buying from a private seller online” fits the bill. And in my case, they
recommended that I contact the police:

If consumers used an instant cash transfer system (such as Western Union or MoneyGram) or
deposited money directly into the seller's bank account, it can be very difficult to track
the money once the seller has collected it. In this case, consumers should contact the
police.

They added:

Although we cannot resolve disputes arising from consumer-to-consumer sales, we can
provide you with further advice. View our Contact us page.

OK, call the police? The first issue is to establish if the transfer had been completed.
Fortunately Craig also has an account with ANZ
bank, so it was an inner-bank transfer. Called up ANZ on the well-hidden number
+61-33-9683- 9999, and spoke to Jen, who first got necessary details of my account and then
established that the transfer was made via “Internet” banking, another department. Connect to Aaron, who went through the same
thing all over again, then said that he couldn't confirm whether the money had arrived, due
to privacy concerns. Somehow that is a breach of the other obligation to trace my payments.
On the other hand, he was able to make a request for refund, which wouldn't
have made any sense if the transfer hadn't completed. He also repeated the advice of CAV to
contact the police: the request is just that, a request, and requires the agreement of the
other party. And the whole thing smells of fraud.

I suppose you can buy Schrödinger's
cat on eBay too. But what an insult! Yes, Craig Weber opened an uppaid item case
against me, and didn't close it. But they believed him!

Deep breath, got eBay to call me (“valued customer”). Spoke to Rayne, who was not only able
to remove the unpaid item case (“because it's the first time”), but also explained the
actions:

The appeal case was closed because I didn't pay with one of the “secure” payment methods
(effectively PayPal), and they were thus
not in a position to reverse the transfer.

This creates more questions than it answers: why didn't they say so when they rejected
the appeal? Why wasn't I warned in advance before committing to buy the item? Why was
I given not one, but three different dates (28 September, 29 September, 5 October) after
which eBay promised to “step in”? Why can't they refund the money? They help
themselves to my account for fees, whether justified or not (as last May). Why can't they change
their terms to recover such costs in a similar manner?

The unpaid item mark was added because the seller had raised an unpaid item dispute and
didn't retract it. Clearly a case
of In dubio contra reum.

Left him with some suggestions, which appeared to genuinely interest him:

When the seller doesn't include any “secure” checkouts, warn the buyer in advance.

If a seller opens a “payment not received” case, don't act on it without proof.

When closing cases, give a reason.

But eBay has been around for 20 years, and they're still such a mess. What's the hope that
this incident will change anything? Surely there must be a way to increase public awareness
of their policies. That should get their interest: it could limit their sales.

Sent Craig Weber a mail telling him that I expected the refund in my account by Thursday
morning, and that I would not go to the police before then.

One of the GPS-related software components that I wanted to look at
was marble, and did so today. It's
a KDE application, which means that if I
don't have a KDE environment, I don't get any help. Still, this stuff is straightforward,
right? No, it's KDE. Climbing directory trees is bad enough with firefox, but KDE goes one step further by
renaming the directories: Home isn't /home, it's (in my
case) /home/grog/. How I hate software that tries to hide the system from you!

Tried it out anyway. There's an “Open” tab, which I used to painstakingly walk my way to my
GPS logs. Found my log file, tried loading. Nothing. No action, no error message. Time
to look for documentation after all. Found a handbook, but it's only HTML, in
many small pages. Just working my way through was a pain. The manual itself could be quite
good, and if it's available in single HTML or PDF form, it might be quite useful. But as it
is, it doesn't help much.

Finally it dawned on me: KDE is not Unix! So when I give it a file name, it doesn't look at
the file, it looks at the name, in this case car.gpslog, throws up its hands in
horror, but is too polite to complain. All I needed was:

Into town today, in principle to have my neck massaged, but it's probably good enough as it
is. On the other hand, my left arm has a pain round the area where I used to receive
vaccinations, and it felt almost like that kind of pain. Heather did various tests and
found a matching point of discomfort round my shoulder blades—referred pain, or something
that I need to look up. Looks like I need to pay (more) attention to my posture, something
that she was reluctant to mention.

The weather today was warm, and has been for a couple of days. In Misery Creek Road things
have changed: the orange bushes are gradually fading, but
the Grevillea bedggoodiana
are coming out, and the greenish flowers are tending towards red:

Replacing our kitchen mixer tap hasn't been easy. The first attempt, over two years
ago, failed because the hole in the sink was 1 mm too small. Then I took the easy way out
and did nothing until a few weeks ago, when I found a plumber and discovered that,
due to poor storage, the metallic coating had tarnished. Considering that the mixer costs
less than the installation, it made sense to buy a new one.

That should have arrived last week, but
Australia Post lost it (the postie carried it
around in his van for a few days), so I didn't get round to picking it up until today. And
what did we find?

Why did Yvonne'smutt stop working after I upgraded her system? I discovered that it was due
to mutt_dotlock failing, and that unlike on previous occasions, it was not due to
NFS. But it worked
for me, and it didn't work for Yvonne. Why not?

Finally found time to have another look. Things weren't made any easier by the fact
that mutt_dotlock
runs setgid, so ktrace
doesn't trace it. How about the good old debugger? How do you create a version of the
program with symbols? A couple of
months ago I found how to do it for FreeBSD software, but mutt is a port. In the end, I just copied the compiler invocation
and added a -g to the compile and link options.

Ran gdb mutt_dotlock and... no output, because it's setgid. All that work
for nothing.

Next, put messages in the source. They showed, surprisingly, that the only check done is
whether mutt_dotlock can write to the mail directory. And it couldn't. Why not?

Isn't that obvious? And yes, of course, a chgrp mail did the trick. Why didn't I
see that before? I can think of two reasons: firstly, I was expecting the problem to be
on lagoon, since I had just upgraded it, and there was no reason to change the group
ownership of /eureka/home/var/mail—in fact, I still have no idea how that happened.
And secondly, I'm sure that I looked at it, but didn't notice. I'm beginning to wondering
whether the real problem is that my eyes are not what they once were.

And why did it work for me? I'm a member of group wheel, so the change didn't cause
any problems.

The image stabilization wasn't worth it. Those few Olympus lenses that have
stabilization (the 12-100 is one of them) interact with the in-body image stabilization,
producing better results than either system by itself. The Panasonic/Leica ones don't.
And I discovered that the lens stabilization of the Vario-Elmarit is considerably worse than the IBIS
of the camera, so effectively useless in this combination.

Then Kev Russell offered a (barely) used lens on Facebook. The price was
right, and I reconsidered. Yup, let's take it.

But that was (mainly) yesterday, and just today I looked in the usual place. And DxO now
supports the lens, though they've taken the opportunity to forget its name. Here how it
reports the Olympus and the Vario-Elmarit:

Last week's upgrade
to lagoon went remarkably smoothly. The only issue was with mutt, which
really had nothing to do
with the upgrade. But today Yvonne wanted to send an
important mail message, They wanted her to print out a file, fill it out by hand, scan it
in, and send it by email.

She came to me and said “don't bother about the email I sent you. Chris will print it for
me”. Huh? Why do we need Chris to print files for us? Went to show her how to download
a PDF file and print it out.

Huh? What's wrong there? lpd is running. Restarted. No change. Finally it dawned
on me: it's this horribleCUPS,
which installs a file /usr/local/bin/lpr, masking the system /bin/lpr. I
can't get rid of CUPS, because some ports depend on it. Is there maybe an official
way to get rid of this file? I found an obvious inofficial way:

Next, fill out the form, scan it in and attach it to a mail message. Yvonne copied herself
for some reason (a copy gets put in her outbox automatically). In this case, though, the
reason was (indirectly) good. Her copy didn't arrive.

Looking at the mail queue, she had about 25 messages that weren't being delivered, like the
one she was looking at:

Then it occurred to me: I hadn't transferred any of the configuration files. No time
to do it then, so I bounced the message from eureka. But it's amazing how many basic
functions can get overlooked for up to a week after an upgrade.

Yesterday was a nice, mild, windless day. I was planning another visit to Misery Creek Road
today, but the weather changed completely. Winds of up to 40 km/h, and in the evening heavy
rain—over 12 mm in an hour. What fun!

Mick the gardener along this afternoon, mainly to weed—something that will keep him busy for
a while—but he also planted our new plants. We had been planning to put them both in pots
because of our poor soil, and also because it gets so wet in the winter—something that these
plants, although grafted, would probably not stand.

But finding native soil is surprisingly difficult. Yesterday Yvonne had found small bags of native potting mix for high prices. What she brought
home proved to be maybe enough for one pot. In the end, called up the vendor of the bushes,
whose name I had conveniently photographed:

dereel.lemis.com? That's been out of commission for years, since I put everything
into eureka. Where did that come from? It wasn't (not surprisingly) in the
RCS files. When I
checked out the latest version, all worked, though clearly I need to pay attention to the
warnings.

Is that too big? That's even without the images. People suggested compression. Here a
part of the discussion for my future reference:

<fwaggle> gr00gle: doesn't look like your webserver is gzipping your html would
would probably slash that
<gr00gle> Do all web clients understand that?
<fwaggle> that don't you probably don't give a shit about
<Darius> would expect 99.999% of clients would request gzip'd data
<Darius> course your web server could gzip the uncompressed stuff on the fly
<fwaggle> aye, and those that don't, other than some braindead MSIE,
shouldn't send the gzip accept-encoding header
<gr00gle> Yes, it would need to be compressed on the fly.
<gr00gle> Since it's generated on the fly.
<fwaggle> gr00gle: pretty sure there's a php flag to do it too
<Darius> fwaggle: yes
<fwaggle> though it's been a long time since i've dealt with php :/
<Darius> or apache has a module I think
<gr00gle> Any pointers would help.
<Andys> its enabled by default in newer versions. mod_deflate
<gr00gle> Thanks.
<Andys> a2enmod deflate ?
<fwaggle> yeah or mod_gzip in apache, which you can have it do on php scripts as well
<Darius>
https://www.warpconduit.net/2010/10/23/enabling-gzip-compression-of-php-css-and-js-files-without-mod_deflate/
<fwaggle> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4709076/how-to-enable-gzip
<fwaggle> (second answer)
* gr00gle pushes on tuit queue.
<gr00gle> Thanks all.
* Darius wonders what will fall off the tuit queue

On the other hand, there's probably a lot to be said for packaging diary entries
differently. My current method started over 17 years ago, where my diary entries were much smaller:

Well, yes, it's right. /var/mail/yvonne is
a symlink. And so it has been for longer
than I can remember, maybe 15 years. Is this some new thing
in postfix? Digging found me this thread, also not new, in
which Wietse Venema writes:

Unfortunately, symlinks to mailbox files are unsafe when the mail directory is writable by
users other than root, regardless of who owns the symlink. You can thank the Linux,
Solaris and IRIX people for that. This security check will not be removed from Postfix.

OK, I thought that it might have been something like that. But why did it happen now? I
discovered that I could work around it by removing /var/mail and making it a symlink
to /eureka/var/mail. But that doesn't explain the problem.

After some thought, it occurred to me that this might be a configuration problem. When
does postfix on lagoon try to deliver locally? The only user is Yvonne, and
she has developed a rather strange habit of copying mail to herself. I think that in the
past lagoon must have forwarded all mail to eureka, which then stored
it in the same mail folder. My recent configuration strangenesses must have meant
that lagoon now tries to deliver mail to lemis.com locally.

Somehow I still can't get my head
around IP-IP tunnels. Last time I set one up, I only had one end to contend
with. Now I have two,
and NAT in between to
boot. Made a clone of a virtual machine to play with, and followed these instructions. They
didn't quite work for me, but I'm wondering if my translation of the IP addresses wasn't to
blame. One of the more bizarre messages was:

Oct 13 17:41:37 stable-11 kernel: gre0: loop detected

I suspect that has to do with use of the same IP range on different interfaces. At least
I'm gradually getting to understand things.

A series of email messages from Craig Weber in my mail today. Here some of the text:

A transfer has been processed.
And because we are not like you there will be a follow up transfer as you have not realised the duplication on your part, we did though.
It is usually a more effective way to get a good outcome by being nice as threats are hardly ever going to be well received.

And as you know, the police won???t do anything so we could very well have kept anything that was paid to us.
All we had to do was send an empty box and it would have been considered ???delivered???.
As mentioned, we are not like you.

Interesting. And yes, he's right. I did pay for the thing immediately on purchase,
but somehow I oversaw the matter. And he complained about non-payment twice by email and
raised a complaint with eBay—6 days after I
had paid—and didn't close it. With that, of course, he doesn't have a leg to stand on. And
his suggestion of sending an empty package is significant. I fear that he speaks from
experience about the police.

Why the change of heart? Maybe he does have something to worry about. In any case,
I haven't contacted the police, mainly because I wanted to present them with a complete
document, so I'll wait until Monday and see if the money comes back.

It's a Caladenia major, and it's
out of focus (only visible on enlarging the image). Today the weather was calm, just the
conditions for focus stacking, so
off to Misery Creek Road again to look for one.

On the way found one of these Pimeleas
that I seem never to have photographed properly, probably
a Pimelea humilis:

I think that tripod is one of the best purchases I have made recently. But other things
didn't work as well. The photos of
the Chamaescilla came out so dark
that I thought there was no recovery possible. DxO Optics “Pro” proved
equal to the task, but why the bad exposure in the first place?

Comparing to the next image that I took with the other camera, this one is underexposed by 3
EV. How did that happen?
I was thinking that it was time to return the camera for service when I discovered that I
had accidentally changed the meter mode to “Spot shadow”. That's far too easy in the field
where you have the camera on a tripod. In general, the viewfinder issue still needs
attention. This toy OI.Share really doesn't do it in sunshine.

Another reason that OI.Share is
not much use is that the phone doesn't work well. This may be this specific phone, but
today the GPS receiver didn't work at all—not until I rebooted it. And the thing
sometimes gets almost too hot to touch when the GPS receiver is on, but only some of the
time. At least I can use the car GPS.

Certainly part of it is the viewfinder issue. Apart from the position of the camera, it's
difficult to look through the viewfinder with a rail protruding to the back. In fact, the
automatic viewfinder switchover doesn't even work:

But nothing happened. What's the reason for that? We have a very similar pump at home, and
there's not much to it: connect power, press lever, and it runs. But here we heard nothing.
Does it need priming? Is there something special required by the solar electric system?
Back home and finally contacted Chris. No, nothing special, but the thing is set up so that
we can pump rainwater into the system as well. Just open the blue valve in the middle:

And the second image clearly shows burnt contacts. Tried cleaning them up, turned on again
and... blew the RCD. OK,
before I do any damage to the system, time for Chris to decide. We can run off the
rainwater pump until she gets back.

Yvonne slept badly last night worrying that Chris Bahlo's
mares might die of thirst: it seems that some of the troughs didn't fill properly yesterday,
something that she hadn't told me. OK, over there again before breakfast to take a look.

Everything looked OK. It seemed that Yvonne didn't realized that the tap had to be open...

While I was there, tried again to get the bore pump running. It seems that cleaning the
contacts had worked: when I turned on the switch, the other pump stopped running.
Repeatedly. Jammed pump motor? The pump is about 50 m below the surface, so nothing I can
do much about myself.

Contacted Chris in the afternoon and arranged to call UPI and get somebody to come out. Jarrod said
that they'd try to make it next week, but I was able to make it clear that this was an
emergency, so he said he'd try to make it on Friday.

An hour later, Nick called. Could he come in an hour? Could he! So over there, and he
tried turning it on, just the way I did, and... it worked! On the one hand a good result,
but it made me look silly, and it bears all the signs of a bug gone into hiding. Hopefully
it stays that way. Nick tells me that if you try too often in quick succession, it will
block, but it's not clear whether that means physically (and thus drawing lots of current,
as I experienced) or none at all. In any case, he measured the pump current, and it was
correct.

While he was there he also addressed an long-standing issue with the house water pump: the
pressure switch didn't work. He first took apart the non-return valve, for reasons that I
didn't understand, but found some junk in it:

Those are scrapings from the inside of a water tank. Potentially they had stopped the
non-return valve from working, so the pump wouldn't cut out. But after removing it, things
still didn't work. So he dismantled the non-return valve and found the entrance clogged
with mud. Finally it worked.

Due to laziness, I had deliberately not taken my tripods and things with me down Misery
Creek Road today. It shows. This photo, the very first I took with my new Olympus
M.Zuiko Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4 IS PRO lens, was just a crop of the whole
image, and it appears to be marginally out of focus:

When I bought my Leica DG Vario-Elmarit 12-60 mm f/2.8-4, one of the first things I did was to
test the image stabilization. One of the drawbacks of using a non-Olympus lens was that I
could have lens stabilization or body stabilization, but not both. And it turned out that
the body stabilization was much better than the lens stabilization, so that feature wasn't
worth much.

Now I have the M.Zuiko
Digital ED 12-100 mm f/4.0 IS PRO, my first stabilized Olympus lens, so of
course I wanted to see how much difference that makes. According to the hype, it's 6.5
“shutter speed stops”. You've got to savour this. Originally, the term “stop” referred to
the detent on the aperture ring of the lens, in those days clearly 1 EV apart. I've never heard it
applied to the shutter before. But basically it's the base
2 logarithm of the amount of light,
just like EV is. So what they're really saying is that you can extend the shutter speed by
a factor of 2 raised to the power of 6.5, or about 90. That's quite impressive, if it's
true. Conventional wisdom has it that you can hand-hold a lens at 1/f,
where f is the full-frame focal length equivalent. So at 45 mm (90 mm equivalent) I
should normally be able to hand-hold the camera at 1/90s. With the promised image
stabilization, it's 1s.

Testing proved more complicated than I thought. With the IS switch turned on, the
camera reported (Exif). Here output first
from exiftool, then
from my exifx script:

Image Stabilization : On, Mode 4
Stabilization: Body

All well and good, but that's exactly what an unstabilized lens reports. What happens when
I turn the switch off?

ON: Stabilizing functions in the lens and camera operate. The IS operates according to
the IS setting in the camera.

OFF:Stabilizing functions in both the lens and camera are off.

OK, that matches. But it begs the question why they bother to put a switch there. You can
do exactly the same thing from the camera. It's also a lot less control than I have on the
Leica lenses, where the switch does make a difference (between lens and body
stabilization). My exifx says:

That's the new tap, and it works correctly, but why is there so much water around the area?
We were concerned that there might be a leak under the ground, but we couldn't see any
evidence, and Yvonne said that Rev had knocked over his water
bucket, so we're hoping that that's the explanation.

It's getting warmer, and I've been keeping an eye on the soil moisture. Today I discovered
that the sprinkler system wasn't working At All.

Further investigation revealed an interesting reason: the sprinkler controller was off the
net. For quite some time I haven't really been doing much with my “Class C” network block,
but it's probably about time. All my systems at home are in the top half, so I can do
things with the other half, including migrating the web site to that area.

That seemed straightforward enough until I discovered that our sprinkler system wasn't
working any more: a network configuration error. The sprinkler controller was one of the
few devices in the first /25.

I've been concerned for some time about the slowness of my sourdough, so a couple of weeks
ago I bought a starter on eBay. It arrived a
few days ago, all 50 g of it, and I've spent the intervening time making 3 full-size (144 g)
starters out of it. It didn't seem noticeably faster in action than my own.

Today I baked the first loaf of bread. Yes, much faster. Breads from my starters
were taking 5 hours and more to rise, and then barely made it past the top of the tin. This
one was done in a good 2 hours, and in the oven was noticeably higher:

Part of repartitioning my (IPv4) network is
to reset the net masks. Previously they were full /24 spaces (netmask 0xffffff00),
and now they need to be set to /25 (netmask 0xffffff80). On my external machine
the interface configuration looked like this:

No response. Oh. This machine isn't local—in fact, it's about as far from here as you can
get on the earth's surface. How do I access the console? I've done it before, but
forgotten the details. Where are the messages I got from RootBSD? Found plenty of them, but not what I was
looking for. Call Mark Price? OK, have the number, do that, but by this time it was 16:19,
so in North Carolina it was 1:19,
not a time I could reasonably expect him to be there.

Gradually I pieced it together. The connection is
via VNC. What do I use for
that? vnc? No, no program of that name. File name completion gave:

If you have a question about TightVNC, or experience a problem, the first place you might
want to look is the TightVNC FAQ.

Well, no, the first place I want to look is the manual. But I haven't been able to find
one. The rest of the page went on to discuss implementations for “Windows”. And the FAQ doesn't include the all-important “How
do I use the bloody thing?”.

I forget how I finally found it, but the correct answer is vncviewer, for which I
found a long man page which didn't even tell me how to enter a password (only how to specify
the name of a file with a stored, encrypted password). But that's not necessary. It
prompts for the password, something that the man page doesn't mention:

So finally I was able to connect to the machine. What did I see? I only had one IP address
on the interface. The all-important main IP address was gone, so there was no way for the
machine to talk to the word. My mistake was to omit the alias keyword:

Margaret Swan has a new car—well, a different, newer one,
a Subaru Forester with all bells
and whistles. She's having difficulty with some of the bells (or was that whistles?), so I
came over today and took a look.

There are two main issues of confusion: first, how do you start the car? For every car I
have ever driven, there's an ignition key, usually coupled with a starter. Not on this car.
Yes, there's a key, if you can reinterpret the information in the 300 page manual, which
tells you to press in the wrong place, but you don't need it, and it doesn't help start the
car. The key module communicates wirelessly with the car electronics and permits starting
the car. And that's done by pressing a button.

Problem: what if you just want to turn the radio on? With conventional ignition keys
there's an intermediate position that turns on most of the electrics, but not the ignition.
You'd expect to find how to do the equivalent in the manual—after all, it's thick enough—but
it's a generic manual with a description of all models, including information about
left-hand drive models, models with old-fashioned ignition keys, and what kind of petrol the
car needs in Beijing and the rest
of China (but no information about what to
do if you move between one and the other). We didn't find the information we were looking
for.

Finally we found it by trial and error:

Living with Subaru Forester electronic start system

For any kind of interaction, the electronic key module must be within about 1 m of the
car.

To start the engine, ensure that the gear lever is in the P position, put foot on
brake (important), and press the “Start” button. The LED in the button lights green.
To stop, press again.

To turn the dash electrics on, ensure foot is not on brake (important), and press the
“Start” button. The LED in the button lights amber.

To turn more dash electrics on, ensure foot is not on brake (important), and press the
“Start” button. The LED in the button remains amber.

I haven't been able to establish the exact difference is between states 3 and 4, but some
trip computer comes on when you press the button again.

How to steal a Subaru Forester with electronic start system

This works best with two people. One engages the owner in conversation near the car,
preferably close to the front passenger door. The other approaches the driver door, waves
at it (it will obligingly unlock), gets in, starts the car, and drives off. The car will
not stop when the key module disappears.

In general, I'm left wondering what the advantage of this whole system is, and why it is so
badly documented.

Subaru Forrester GPS

The other thing that Margaret couldn't fathom was the GPS system (for which there is another
manual with a title something like “Onboard SD Card System”). The documentation is
voluminous and verbose, but I managed to find enough (marginally correct) information to
start the thing. And surprise, surprise, it was the same iGo software that my el-cheapo GPS
navigator uses. Well, almost. It seems to have been castrated: lots of functionality is
missing, like the all-important “use unpaved roads”. This is iGo version 9, while mine is
version 8. Has it been deliberately restricted, or is this a sign of the times? In any
case, Margaret doesn't like it, and would prefer her old Garmin GPS, which at least has the
advantage that she knows how to use it.

On the positive side, it displays a compass. I need to check if there's a way to enable
that on my navigator.

Apart from that, it's nice to have the unit mounted in the dashboard, where it doesn't
bounce or fall off on poorly paved roads. But, like the speedometer of
the Mini 50 years ago, it points straight
over your shoulder, and there's no way to tilt it. In a car with so many unnecessary
“comforts”, you'd think they would have done something about that.

Call from Maggie Keenan of the Domestic
Buildings Dispute Resolution Victoria regarding the complaint that I entered
in June. It has finally
come to the top of the queue, and it looks like we will have a session together on 11
December. In the meantime, she needs more information. It seems that it needs to be in
particular places: the additional information that I supplied in my complaint should have
been put in the (Microsoft Word!)
document, because otherwise it can't be processed. But she asked for my permission
(granted) to move it there. I wonder what will happen to the layout. She also needs
addition documentation: all mail exchange with JG King, and also the contract, building plans, and building permit. Why? No idea,
but then I'm a mere mortal.

As advertised, “focus stacking” jumps backward and forward. Why? The most difficult thing
I have found with focus stacking of either kind is to set the start focus. With “focus
bracketing” it's relatively easy: just in front of the closest point you want sharp. You
still (currently) have to guess where it will finish. But with in-camera “focus stacking”
you don't know either point!

The other thing is the question of overlap. These images were taken with the lenses at 30
mm and f/8. My depth of field program comes up with
different depths of field from exiftool. Mine are based on a circle of confusion of 8 μm, and give:

Based on those figures, there are gaps in the depth of field, though they're not
significant. If you can accept a 10 μm circle of confusion, they overlap. So maybe the way
to look at focus stacking is to hypothesize that the focus differential is related to the
size of the circle of confusion. For that to be the case, the steps would have to change
with focal length and aperture. Time for some more test photos.

The other thing that occurs to me is that it's really not that interesting to actually
process the images, so I can make them as small as I like (since I hate throwing away any
image that I have taken). But I can see a lot of playing around ahead of me: try focus
stacks with different focal lengths and apertures, and with both of the cameras that can do
it.

House photos again today, with nothing
much to distinguish them from other days—until I tried to process them. And then, for
reasons I don't understand, the control point detectors didn't work. It's not the first
time, and in the past I have blamed it on low contrast. But today the contrast wasn't that
bad. I finally got things done, but not without a considerable amount of messing around.

This one is so common that I had thought it was a weed, but apparently it's a native. But I
can't find the name of it: my old plant books have gone into hiding, and the books I bought
in Halls Gap two weeks ago don't
mention it:

Saturday evening, dinner with Chris Bahlo. Today Margaret Swan was there too. I've been
meaning to take photos of us every time, but things haven't worked out well. They showed up
late, and I didn't have much time, and after a couple of these I gave up:

What's wrong? Presumably the studio flash went off too early again. I really need to make
this more reliable.

Dinner was sushi
and sashimi from a new Japanese
restaurant in town. Not my taste. There was stuff with things like mayonnaise, and others
with thoroughly cooked fish, which tasted like it came out of a can. Chris tells me that
they saw Japanese people easing there, so they clearly knew what to avoid.

<peter> groggyhimself: Regarding keyless ignition (it's getting common and not limited to Subaru):
You can build/buy range extender units so that you can steal the car whilst the keys are in
the owner's house.

We discussed it at dinner, and Margaret came up with the additional information that the
engine stops when the car stops, and automatically restarts when you want to drive off.
Would this still happen if the key module is missing? Otherwise people might need some
modification to their driving style.

And who needs to steal a car for only one drive? It sounds ideal for a getaway car.

I'm still thinking about focus
stacking, without making much headway. About the only thing of interest is that various
people are coming up with more information, which I'm keeping in my focus stacking page. So far I
have:

Had a talk with the people erecting it. As expected, it's for Telstra mobile phones. Finally! It should be finished
less than 5 years after Denis
Napthinepromised. They
should have the tower up by the end of next week or so. It's not clear how long Telstra
will take to activate it, but the foreman tells me that they installed the other end of the
microwave link (on the Buninyong tower)
at the beginning of the year. Clearly politics has got in the way. That's also clear from
the fact that there is another tower at all. The antenna would easily have fitted on the
existing NBN tower, but the foreman tells me that very few antennas get co-located on NBN
towers. On the other hand, there are a number of NBN antennas co-located on other towers,
notably Telstra. Doesn't politics make life easy?

Somehow the accuracy of the GPS receiver in my Samsung GT-I9100T mobile
phone leaves a lot to be desired. Lately I've been taking it while walking the dogs, but
the logs suggest that I haven't left the property. Today I took it with me while taking
photos of the mobile phone tower, with the car GPS navigator as a backup. It's easier to
get the logs off the phone, so I did that. But the location I got was over 500 m away!
That's clearly a different problem: It was further south, where I didn't go at all. The car
GPS navigator worked fine, but of course showed the location of the car, not the location of
the camera. I'm coming to the conclusion that I need a better mobile phone.

Huh? We did that only two months
ago, and even then we had a lot of irritation. Why do they want Yet Another one?
Decided not to call the free number that they supplied (0800 1802 482). That's a German
number, but they put it anyway on a letter sent to an Australian address. And the other
number (03 6222 3455) didn't work either: it just gave a bewildering number of redirections.
So I had to call 131673 and pay money, although they have a “landline” number.

Connected to Sarah in a relatively short period of time. She was actually helpful: she
established that yes, they already had the information, and that somebody must have
forgotten to cancel the automatic reminder. Apologies, and please disregard this letter.

OK, still no refund from Craig Weber, about whom I only know phone numbers ((02) 9638 5221
and 0412 25 00 00), eBay user ID
(klearview_au) and email address (craigweber@optusnet.com.au). Time for
the police.

Or is it? Checked the web site and discovered that it's not possible to report crimes
online. Call the police station. So at 13:10 I called up the police
in Ballarat on (03) 53366000, was
presented with a long list of topics organized from their point of view, so finally chose
“uniform”, something that is completely irrelevant to me. They weren't very helpful. After
a while, they suggested an acorn.

Acorn? No, ACORN, the Australian Cybercrime
Online Reporting Network, a name that sounds like a reverse fit to the acronym. Clearly
it's a completely different category of crime when I buy something online as opposed to
buying from a newspaper advertisement. They weren't very encouraging:

After submitting your report, you will not receive any further correspondence on behalf of
the ACORN. If further information is required, the police agency investigating your report
will contact you.

So I filled out the form, being continually reminded that I may never hear from them again.
Maybe Craig was right when he wrote:

There are now many wildflowers round the entrance to the house. Time to try some
experiments. One of the biggest issues in
taking focus stacked images is
wind. There wasn't much wind today, but enough to be irritating, so I tried setting up
protection: